The Backchannel Book Webinar
Cliff Atkinson has a new book. It hit the street a few days ago. The title is The Backchannel. I have a copy of it and I have had a blast reading it, so when Cliff invited me to a webinar about the book I jumped at the chance to attend.
The backchannel is a subcurrent of discussion, typically using social media applications, that take place while an event is going on. I use the term event but most of the time you hear it in relation to presentations. You can have backchannels for book releases, movies, concerts, sporting events, courses, etc. Heck, Cliff’s book has a backchannel associated with it.
The webinar had a great backchannel and I think that we all learned a lot. One thing that I liked about the webinar was that in addition to the backchannel it had a great “frontchannel” as well. There was verbal discussions among the participants. Make that high-quality verbal discussions among the participants.
I usually listen and take notes when I attend presentations, whether on the Web or live. Plus, I am not afraid to ask a question. What I don’t typically do is tweet, IM, etc. But today was different @DaveGray tweeted that he had setup a backchannel…
That prompted this tweet….
I will take this a little further. It is wrong not to tweet during a presentation about the backchannel. You need to know what it is like as an audience member before – BEFORE — you present to a backchannel. If you don’t you are begging for trouble.
You are presenting to the backchannel as well as the people sitting in front of you.
There are differing opinions regarding this. The old school view is that the people sitting in front of you paid to be there and you should focus on them. You can see that expressed here.
I believe that there is a lot of validity to this view. Fortunately, I think a creating and delivering a great experience satisfies both groups.
You aren’t just delivering a presentation you are delivering an experience.
You hear about the backchannel and it’s ties to technical conferences but I am pretty sure that if you participate in a backchannel while a speaker is describing, and showing, how you change the DB Control settings in Teradata you are going to miss something. I am not certain how the backchannel will relate to the presentations that I give. I may not ever see it, but you know what? I am not going to take that chance.
Prepare for the backchannel even if you don’t think you will ever face it — it will make your presentations better.
Here is another way of thinking about this…
It’s good that there might actually be a downside to sucking as a presenter — we’ve been tortured too long.
You can check-out the Twitter backchannel of Cliff’s talk (and book) by clicking here –> #backchannelbook.
Thanks for the experience Cliff! I appreciate it.
You’re welcome Jeff! You’re absolutely right – presenters need to participate in the backchannel of a presentation in order to experience for themselves what this is all about, otherwise it’s all just an abstraction. I would imagine that even in your own participation today, you experienced benefits of a backchannel that are not evident to most speakers, among them:
- You connected with interesting people like @davegray who you’re likely to stay in touch with, at least via Twitter
- You continued the conversation with others well after the presentation
- Your ideas were tweeted and re-tweeted by Dave and others to a much bigger audience outside of the ones who attended
- You were fired up enough about the topic to write a great blog post!
By the way, I’ll be writing up a blog post about today’s webinar, but in the meantime, here’s a direct link to the recording of the session:
http://bbpmedia.na6.acrobat.com/p84583871
Hi Cliff,
Thank you for taking time to comment on my blog post. It means a lot to me.
Everything you have said is soooooo true. There are lot’s of benefits of embracing the backchannel. There may be no “official” backchannel in your presentation but we should prepare like there will be. I really like the portion of your book, The Backchannel, where you describe the supporting material and how we should place it on the web.
There are many other “little” insights, many people will gloss over them, that are going to make a huge difference in my life. Fortunately, I tend to create my presentations in a way that is very BackChannel friendly, So this makes a lot of sense to me.
I think that it goes without saying, this will force many speakers to step up their game.